Anyone can install a basic mist system. Even garden sprinklers can be repurposed as a misting mechanism, although the lack of a recirculating feature would send your water bill skyrocketing. Meanwhile, evaporative coolers check off all the boxes in the pros column, including that all-important recirculation feature. Here, take a look at a few typical “misting” examples so that you can see the differences between the two cooling technologies.
Areal Differences
If you’ve ever been to a theme park, you’ve felt the misty drizzle escaping pipe nozzles. Located somewhere above your head, the vapourised water escapes tubing as a foggy cloud. That fog drops low as the theme park temperature rises. Frankly, the system does benefit a fixed area, one that covers a long ride queue, for example, but it doesn’t have the power to cover large areas. Over at a nearby nursery, a portable evaporative cooler is purring powerfully as it uses its large fan to deliver pad-evaporated moisture to a larger area.
The Pump VS. Fan Drive Issue
An effective cooling solution, one that skips environmentally questionable chemicals, uses several technologies to bolster cooling impetus. A water pump acts as the heart of the evaporative mechanism, then a fan takes on the role of the droplet dispersing limbs. Those fan blades carry the evaporative envelope, so the equipment absolutely relies on two drive systems. Conversely, mist systems are pressure-sensitive devices. They operate on low, medium, or high-pressure water supplies, with the piped water channelled directly from a structure’s mains supply. That one feature mostly precludes the portability factor we’ve all come to associate with evaporative coolers.
Accommodating a Balancing Act
It’s because of the electricity, the fan, and the fan blades that a dynamic evaporative appliance works well in humid and hot zones, including farm buildings and factories. Mist systems require a little more design consideration before they can be confidently placed in hot zones. Naturally, a higher pressure helps to amplify the misting process, but then the strained nozzles don’t create the same “wetting” effect. If the fogging mechanism system favours a lower pressure, the tubes and nozzles simply won’t function effectively when the weather turns humid.
Nozzles and tubes carve out a path for mist cooling systems. Built to cover larger and wetter spaces, evaporative coolers free the cooling effect to flow like a cool, refreshing cloud. However, that’s not to say the mist option doesn’t have its place. Used in defined quarters, on swimming pool edges, patios, and theme park queues, mist systems work very effectively indeed.